Edwin Hoffman en Arjan Verdooren - Diversity competence

1  Culture: everywhere and nowhere

At the same time, culture is nowhere because it does not exist in any specific or ‘real’ sense. Culture is obviously a concept invented by people – and in that sense culture as a concept is also part of culture. Culture is in itself something abstract – a helpful tool to analyse phenomena on the collective level (Baumann, 1996) and to make distinctions between the behaviour and ideas of groups of people (Scollon, Wong Scollon & Jones, 2012). But in itself, it is often an ex planation that does not explain: to say that a culture is such and such does not provide an explanation, but merely an observation about a group of people or a particular place (Bennett, 2005). The fallacy of thinking that cultures are actual ‘things’ with clear borders that exclusively separate groups of people and deter mine their behaviour is called ‘cultural essentialism’ (Holiday, 2011), and it is this essentialism that we try to avoid throughout this book. By discussing the many aspects and complexities of cultures, we will try to show that ‘culture’ is a very significant phenomenon, without implying that it does anything on its own. 1.1.2 Culture and groups Often when people speak of ‘culture’, they are referring to groups on the basis of nationality: people that are from and live in the same country, or on the basis of ethnicity: people that share a common kinship and history. Nationality and eth nicity can overlap but are not necessarily the same. Nations (or countries) can comprise several ethnic groups, and migrants and their children often hold the nationality of the host country but are still considered to have a different eth nic background. Sometimes, people use culture to refer to even bigger groups based on geography, e.g. Asian, African or even Western culture. Many exam ples in this chapter refer to culture at the level of nationality or ethnicity. However, culture is a characteristic of any human group. Nearly every group that shares something in common, has a mutual culture. Aside from national or ethnic groups, professional groups (police culture, banking culture, IT culture), regions (Mid-West culture, Bavarian culture), city cultures (Beijing culture, Pa risian culture), groups around sports and leisure activities (gaming culture, FC Liverpool culture), family cultures or company cultures (IKEA culture, IBM culture, KFC culture) are all characterized by certain habits and traditions. In today’s world, we can even speak of ‘online’ cultures where communities are formed through the internet, enabling people in different locations to com municate around a videogame, a common interest or fanship via social media, forum discussions, chat, blogs and vlogs. Such cultures are often dubbed ‘subcultures’, implying that they are somehow less powerful or relevant than national or ethnic cultures. This can be mislead-

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